Month: February 2020

Enlarge / Boris Hagelin's mechanical crypto gear, like the CX-52 first introduced in 1952, gave US intelligence fits. So they cut deals with Hagelin and eventually bought the company. (credit: Rama , Wikimedia Commons, Cc-by-sa-2.0-fr)

Crypto AG, a Swiss cryptographic communications gear company that got its big break building code-making gear for the US Army in World War II, has been a provider of encryption systems for more than 120 countries. And according to a report by The Washington Post and German broadcaster ZDF, the company was owned outright for decades by the Central Intelligence Agency and Germany's intelligence agency, the BND—allowing the CIA, the National Security Agency, and German intelligence to read the most sensitive communications of practically everyone but the Soviets and Chinese.

That unprecedented level of access allowed the US to monitor Iranian communications during the Iranian hostage crisis, Argentine communications during the Falklands War (shared with British intelligence), the communications of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat during negotiations of an Egypt-Israel peace deal at Camp David, and communications from Libya that confirmed the Qaddafi regime's involvement in a 1986 West Berlin disco bombing. During the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, Iranian communications were "80-90 percent readable," according to documents viewed by the Post and ZDF.

While German intelligence cashed out of the company in the 1990s, the CIA's ownership persisted until 2016, even though the intelligence value of the company diminished with the widespread availability of other digital cryptography tools—and a series of missteps, including what a CIA history described as a "storm of publicity" after the arrest of a Crypto AG salesman in Iran in 1992. But the history also informs the US government's concerns over the potential threat that comes from other countries' ownership of parts of communications infrastructure, including concerns over China's Huawei.

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  The new $169 Logitech StreamCam. [credit: Logitech ]

Today, creating videos for platforms like YouTube and Twitch has few barriers to entry but many barriers to success. Logitech is hoping it can make things easier for aspiring online creators and streamers with its new StreamCam, a 1080p webcam with features like autofocus and built-in image stabilization that are tailored to online creators' needs.

Logitech already has a number of accessories that creators and streamers can use including microphones and other webcams. But none of those accessories were made with streamers in mind to this extent—in an effort to fill what it sees as a void in the market, Logitech surveyed a number of online creators and streamers to see what they'd want in an ideal webcam.

And thus, StreamCam came to be: it records 1080p video at 60fps and has autofocus capabilities. Auto-exposure compensates for poor background lighting as well as light changes to make sure that the subject of the video is never shadowed. Built-in image stabilization reduces unwanted movement for a continuously smooth shot as well.